Sippi Azarbaijani-Moghaddam
Including Marginalised Groups in the Legal System
State Reconstruction and International Engagement in Afghanistan
Center for Development Research, Bonn
May 30-June 1, 2003
While there are many definitions of marginalized groups, I will focus exclusively
on the situation of women. In the last two decades a number of historically
marginalised groups in Afghanistan, such as the Shiite Hazaras and even
Ismailis, were able to take up arms in order to convey their dissatisfaction with the
status quo and, thus, now factor in state security computations. Other
marginalized groups, such as the Kuchis, also seem to act somewhat more
collectively through existing tribal structures. Women, however, have not resorted
to collective or armed action to gain power and, being powerless, can be further
marginalised if need be. Thus, to focus the paper, I will talk about the inclusion of
women in the legal system and examine some of the entry points, hindrances,
and inadvisable approaches.
Historically, gender discrimination for a variety of reasons has led to the
consistent marginalisation of the majority of Afghan women, from health care and
education, as well as economics and the legal system. The compounded result of
decades of discrimination at different levels of Afghan society has left many
women disenfranchised due to lack of security, mobility, literacy and an ability to
earn an independent livelihood.
In the past two decades in Afghanistan, disputes have been solved through a
variety of new and traditional methods, parallel to fragmented and reduced but
functioning state structures. The Constitution and Judicial Reform Commissions
are currently tasked with weaving as many of the existing strands as possible into
a coherent process of legal reform at national level. These important accessories
to the process of legitimising the current government, beyond the confines of
Kabul, are bound to be characterised by heated debate. Discussions on
historically controversial topics such as the gender issue and the role of Islam
over Afghanistan’s legal framework will no doubt involve a great deal of delicate
manoeuvring and circumvention.
Taking History, Traditional Structures and the Family into Account
The 1964 constitution granted women a great deal of freedoms and possibilities
on paper but it was the practised law of the land, highly discriminatory and
anachronistic in some details, and actual implementation of that law on the
ground which has consistently left women in a bind. Consider the following
example:
Tribal Laws: In many regions of Afghanistan, especially where central state
authority has been weak, people turn to community leaders, tribal councils and
other forms of mediation, as opposed to official courts, to solve legal disputes.
Pushtun areas in particular are known for their elaborate tribal justice system. On
the one hand, incorporation of customary and tribal law is a key issue for Afghan
politics since it has the potential to undermine the legitimacy and enforceability of
any legal system beyond the confines of Kabul. Denial of access to these
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traditional systems at this sensitive juncture can be seen as undemocratic and
threaten the legitimacy of the legal reform process. On the other hand, one has to
look into the sections of tribal law that would lead to a continuation of a number of
discriminatory practices against women, which even run counter to the tenets of
Islam, for example, bad, the giving of women in exchange for crimes committed.
It will be impossible to reject the existing bodies of tribal law in their entirety as
this will damage the legal reform process, but, at the same time, there is no need
to take on board practices which are highly discriminatory against women.
Recommendation: As part of the legal reform process, customary law should be
researched in detail with a view to empowering groups who suffer discrimination
as a direct result of such codices to challenge practices which perpetuate their
mistreatment. This may avoid a trajectory which ends in rejection of the reformed
legal system and could instead result in giving women in some regions rights
which they have never enjoyed. This is, however, a tricky and complex area to
tackle and does not lend itself easily to quick fixes and instant democracy
deadlines.
Similar to promoting understanding of tribal structures and legal systems, a
realisation of the elasticity of family boundaries is the key to help women link into
national systems. This is often influenced by intricate social intra and interfamilial, as well as community relationships. The gender dynamics within these
relationships determine women’s access to legal advice, assistance or arbitration
in disputes at family and community level. We have to understand that even
within a framework of functioning and enforceable laws, women would have to
emerge from the confines of family and community to interact with the legal
system. We do not know enough about the internal gender dynamics of family
and community in relation to legal assistance to ascertain how we will help
women stretch the private boundaries to overlap into the public domain, and, to
determine how the legal system has to be made more accessible at different
levels.
Recommendation: A vital part of the research underpinning the legal reform
process should involve investigating the gender dynamics of accessing legal
assistance from within the family and the community.
A Multi-Faceted Approach
Too often, we do not see the complete picture, or we execute the old top down
approach, trying to influence the micro-level from a macro point of view. While
this may work in other countries, my earlier elaboration of the power that families
and traditional structures hold should make us re-think our current approach and
to start focusing largely on a bottom-up approach which may be costly and slow
but ultimately more effective.
Although the gender picture in Afghanistan is dreary, women have been able to
affect politics and violence at micro-level by, for instance, enabling and assisting
their men folk to join the jihad, various militia groups or the Taliban. Their work in
carpet weaving and handicrafts at the micro-level allows some men to become
wealthy at middle and macro-level. No one programme in Afghanistan is helping
women create effective overlaps between the micro and macro in any sector, in
meaningful numbers. In fact an examination of programmes points to an unwitting
policy of keeping most women entrenched at the micro-level while a miniscule
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number of women operate in the ether above. The dearth of actual quality time
spent looking for lasting solutions to the predicament of the majority of Afghan
women leaves me firmly convinced that to date the last minute scramble to
involve a quota of women in various national processes and consultations has
largely been tokenistic.
Recommendation: Instead of involving a small number of women in national
processes, as a form of window dressing, it would be far more advisable to
mobilise women in larger numbers at the grassroots as well, in order to
understand, to engage and to choose their own representatives for various
processes as often as possible. Such a course of action may be costly and timeconsuming but the alternative is lip-service and ultimately, failure.
Pacing Change
With this in mind, if we look at current efforts to provide legal advice and
assistance to Afghan women quite often we see it coming in piecemeal packages
from foreigners with little or no knowledge, appreciation or interest in Islam and
Islamic law. It is with a sense of foreboding that I have listened to a number of
newly arrived women’s rights activists complaining that Islam is “bad” for women
and others moaning about Afghan women’s adherence to Islamic values, asking
when they would “get their act together” and become “modern”. What better way
to alienate more conservative elements and to depict women’s access to their
rights within a legal system as a controversial issue which is being appropriated
by infidels.
In sum, there are two groups who are very different in their nature but both united
in doing a great disservice to Afghan women. The first group of secular Afghans,
from the minority group described in more detail below, actually promote a “goimperceptibly-slow” approach on the gender issue, which their international male
counterparts gladly follow. Linguistic, cultural and religious sensory deprivation
has left many internationals over-reliant on a small group of ‘progressive’
Afghans, from a narrow stratum of society, which has historically misinterpreted
the myriad nuances of Afghanistan through a myopic social lens with
unsuccessful results. But even this minority group, often with unrepresentative
views, accommodate a range of seemingly incompatible ultra-modern and ultraconservative stances, utilising all the correct vocabulary and concepts while still
having to control, for instance, the dress code and mobility of their female
colleagues and womenfolk in order to convey the right impression of honourable
manliness in their own extended family and socio-political networks.
The second group is of newly arrived international females who seem to have a
barely masked contempt for Afghan culture and Islam, and tear around Kabul and
some other parts of Afghanistan like loose canons, expecting instant change. For
both groups, there is no sane middle ground where Afghans and their religion of
Islam are seen as progressive and capable of embracing change in their own
time.
Recommendation: Donor countries should be very careful before supporting
particular packages for advancing women’s rights as they may appear promising
to western eyes but could be extremely damaging if implemented hastily on the
ground. After all, alienation of certain political and religious forces tends to lead
to a backlash against rapid reformist change however well meant. We only need
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to consider Afghan history for examples of the oscillation between liberal and
oppressive, religious and secular, as one or more groups were repressed or
alienated. At the same time, however, society is ever changing and views on
gender have mutated as Afghans have experienced other social, geographical
and political environments. We should not be afraid of pushing forward and
experimenting with the elasticity of gender boundaries in a well- thought out and
appropriate manner.
The Role of Islam
Most Afghans see Islam as an integral part of their history and culture. “[M]uch of
Afghan law, including the Civil, and Penal Codes, is Islamic, and – equally
importantly – is perceived as Islamic.”i Islamic law in Afghanistan is not a
straightforward matter and it must be kept in mind that there are grey areas since
there is no standard of Islamic law, no acceptable arbiters of this standard and no
guidance for issues regarding precedence when Islamic law comes into conflict
with other sources of law. Secularisation of the legal system may be effected
superficially but variations of Islamic law tinged with customary practice will
continue to thrive in the provincial and rural hinterland for many years to come. A
succession of interpretations has resulted in discriminatory practices against
women but there is unexploited room to manoeuvre in some, but unfortunately
not all, quarters at present. Some women have their own ways of navigating the
more traditional terrain in relation to seeking justice but we do not know enough
about such processes to duplicate them and use them to mobilise larger numbers
of women.
Recommendation: Afghan women will be dealing with variants of Islamic law for
many years to come and need allies and skills to navigate existing systems. At
this moment in Afghanistan’s history some conservative religious groups are
open to compromise and to revisit some disputed areas such as women’s
employment and girls’ education. This fertile ground for Afghan women to interact
with such groups must be exploited. It could prove empowering for Afghan
women to explore their Islamic heritage, to interpret it and to learn to control it
rather than vice versa. The key is to build alliances and to use Islam to argue for
equality issues. At present there would appear to be little or no effort to assist
Afghan women in doing this on a significant scale.
Human Security versus State Security
We may be able to convince families that the legal system is there to help them,
and that allowing women to access the legal system will ultimately improve family
well-being from a number of angles. But how can families become convinced that
it is safe for their women to partially or fully emerge from the safety of the home to
link up with any government initiative when Afghanistan is in a situation where
human security is under threat due to the fall out of involving warlords to achieve
larger geopolitical goals in the War on Terror. In a system where actors other
than the state have monopoly over the use of violence, where those actors can
obstruct the course of justice and where specific military and political groups
linked closely with the state apparatus appear untouchable, everyone is
potentially marginalised from access to legal redress. Where families perceive the
state as a threat, corrupt or unable to control those who are, they will mistrust
state systems, especially if they have heard from charismatic and authoritative
religious figures that they smack of anti-Islamic or anti-Afghan sentiment. Apart
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from the current situation, Afghan history in the past two decades has buffeted
men and women with conflicting ideologies and many have become wary of an
enthusiastic response to the latest fad from Kabul. In this environment families
will continue to keep their women and girls away from situations which they
mistrust or fail to understand.
It cannot be denied that according to certain analyses, addressing gender issues
in the Afghan context is vital from a human security angle but dangerous from a
state security point of view. In fact those determining state security, often with no
gender experts among them, can usually afford to circumvent and ignore the
gender issue. Already we are seeing women excluded from certain democracy
promoting projects, because of the logistics of reaching women in some cases,
as well as fears from some quarters that involving rural women could upset
conservative sensibilities in the provinces and stall the process – and this with no
meaningful consultations with the communities who will be affected.
Recommendation: It is easy to see that women’s involvement can always be put
on a back burner until some mythical future period of mutual peace and harmony
but ignoring them makes any democracy project appear laughable. True
commitment to empowering marginalised groups involves balancing state
security and geopolitical concerns against those related to human security, based
on sound analyses.
Conclusion
In addition to involving women at national level, we must begin looking at ways to
involve large numbers of women in the legal system and its reform at family level.
Families need to be convinced that it is safe to allow women to do this. It is
essential that the research underpinning the legal reform process looks, in the
short and medium term, at the mosaic of intimate human and social relations
which surround the practice of law, especially with regard to marginalised groups
such as women.
Bringing in non-Muslim outsiders to help women gain access to the legal reform
process is a superficial, Kabul-centric exercise and does not help the majority of
Afghan women. Instead of cultivating the polarized stances on Islamic law which
are emerging from the legal reform process, especially where it comes to
marginalised groups, there is a need for dialogue, consultation and inclusion, not
only of regional interlocutors but also of conservative religious elements holding,
whether we like it or not, a wealth of relevant experience. Seeking common
ground for compromise rather than outright exclusion of particular groups is a
better option for guaranteeing success in securing women’s involvement.
Examples from around the Islamic world have shown that Islam and Islamic law
can be progressive and capable of embracing change. But this process can only
come from within – it can be supported but not imposed by external actors.
Involving women at the lowest levels, initiating debates and research at family
and community level, encouraging and supporting women to engage
conservative elements in gender debates linked to the process of legal reform –
to some these may seem like threats to the current status quo, state security and
geopolitical considerations but they are essential for human security and a
sustainable inclusion of women in the legal reform process.
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Harvard Program on Humanitarian Policy and Conflict Research – Conflict Prevention Initiative
Afghan Legal Reform: Challenges and Opportunities HPCR Policy Brief, January 2003
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